Aside from the fact that flash mobs are actually an offline thing (the author is almost painfully un-hip), this paragraph from page 380 of Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Towerdoes a good job of explaining why we’re in the mess we’re in.

As Ferguson notes, the main problem is getting people’s attention and sustaining it on important issues. The news cycle, a constant barrage of celebrity gossip, and good old-fashioned nosy neighbourliness drowns out most engagement with serious problems.

I wasn’t sure what it was, but being familiar with Martin Hawksey’s TAGS project, I guessed it was some kind of social network analysis.

What is this?

The NodeXL Graph Gallery is a collection of network data sets and visualizations created with NodeXL.

What is NodeXL?

NodeXL is an add-in for Excel that extends the familiar spreadsheet so that it can collect, analyze, visualize and create a report about connected structures (“networks”).

What is a network?

A network is any collection of connections among a population of people or things. For example, when a population of people is connected by relationships they form a web of ties that have a shape or structure. Words, computers, businesses, and nations can all have connections with one another.

What is network analysis?

Networks can be analyzed to measure their size and shape as well as the location of each person or thing in the network relative to all the others. Groups, clusters, regions or neighborhoods can be identified, Network science studies the properties of connected structures.

What is social network analysis?

Any network that includes people can be thought of as a social network. Social networks are formed whenever people interact or exchange with one another. Social network analysis applies network analysis methods to populations of people to reveal people with greatest influence, major groups or divisions, and the people who bridge those divides.

It’s pretty comprehensive, and breaks down groups into segments.

The graph represents a network of 1,427 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained “moodle”, or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 09 July 2018 at 20:02 UTC.

The requested start date was Monday, 09 July 2018 at 00:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14.

The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000.

The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 13-day, 23-hour, 57-minute period from Monday, 25 June 2018 at 00:03 UTC to Monday, 09 July 2018 at 00:00 UTC.

Additional tweets that were mentioned in this data set were also collected from prior time periods. These tweets may expand the complete time period of the data.

There is an edge for each “replies-to” relationship in a tweet, an edge for each “mentions” relationship in a tweet, and a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a “replies-to” or “mentions”.